Alea Workshop

Google Nearby technology is included in several recent Android phones.
Using Bluetooth Low Energy, mobile apps can discover ambient services or
surrounding devices and interact with them. Some basic use cases need an app to
be installed (e.g. for file exchanges, …), however it is possible for Android
phones to discover and react to some Bluetooth Low Energy signals without
installing anything.

It is the Nearby Notifications variant of
Nearby, and it includes the discovery of URLs or the advertisement of
some mobile app references that will popup in the notification area of Android.

Usually, Nearby is triggered on a phone by using some special Bluetooth Low
Energy beacons. The Android Beacon Simulator app that I have
developed is compatible with Nearby broadcasts. We will use it to simulate a
Nearby broadcast and observe how Android phones react to them. For instance it
easy to broadcast a Twitter account reference around oneself!

Maven is an interesting tool. It helps to create more well designed packaged
project and it is the basis to other tools like Ivy or Gradle.

But still, the Maven way is so obsessed with imposing best practices that it can
be incredibly hard to use it with edge cases. One case that I often encounter is
to simply use a local jar 3rd party file as a library without putting it in a
Maven repository.

This post is a memo to remind the different possibilities of achieving that.

Something every developer should know: when you develop a project that has to go
in production, it is good to control the version of the dependencies you use.
Embed the libraries you use, or at least set fixed version numbers in your
favorite dependency management tool.

By nature, an Android app can be stopped and killed any time by the user or the
system. The system can decide to kill an app to free some memory. It is also
very easy for the user to display the recent app list and to swipe an app,
thinking he kills the app by doing so.

Contrary to iOS, Android allows running some background tasks through Services;
knowing the effects of an app swipe on services is important to correctly
implement apps’ services.

Ever dreamed to pilot your own robot? Without using a keyboard and without tons of sensors on your skin? Just by moving? Actually, lots of people are working on this kind of thing and have some working prototypes. Well… expensive prototypes.

However, do you know it is possible for you to build your own prototype?